Two years ago, I bought a Raspberry Pi “for the family” and we messed with it for a while, but it soon found its way to sitting a box in the closet.

Last year around Christmastime, I explored an idea that’s been floating around in my head on making a Christmas light display set to music. It wasn’t long before I found this post on making Christmas tree lights flash to music.

I became intrigued enough to order the solid state relay board that was recommended, and since they were cheap I purchased two. I think they came directly from China because they took several weeks to arrive. By that time, the new year had arrived, and my interest waned. I put them in the closet with the Pi, thinking maybe next year.

With the cooler weather and heading into fall, I’ve been thinking ahead and wondering if I couldn’t make those things actually work in a lightshow. As you can see from the video at the beginning of this post, things are actually coming together. It took me quite a while to sort out what needed to be done, and to get the information I needed to make things work. I was so excited when I actually got the first light to blink!

In the next post, I will write a step by step set of instructions of what I learned, so hopefully it can help save someone some time getting things set up. I’m nowhere near an expert on this, but am very happy that some things are starting to come together.

***Edit***

With a little more tinkering, I was able to get three channels working with some music . I’m still working on a tutorial post on how it was done. In the mean time, here’s a short video of the lights & music.